“In God’s name, Silas Foster,” cried I with bitter indignation. “let

that dead woman alone!”

“Why, man, it’s not decent!” answered he, staring at me in amazement.  “I can’t bear to see her looking so!  Well, well,” added he, after a third effort, “’tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women to do their best with her, after we get to the house.  The sooner that’s done, the better.”

We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and formed a bier by laying across some boards from the bottom of the boat.  And thus we bore Zenobia homeward.  Six hours before, how beautiful!  At midnight, what a horror!  A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously, I doubt not, on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth.  Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly circumstances of death,—­how ill it would become her, the altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old Silas Foster’s efforts to improve the matter,—­she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in a badly fitting garment!  Zenobia, I have often thought, was not quite simple in her death.  She had seen pictures, I suppose, of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes.  And she deemed it well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have, wronged in their first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old familiar stream,—­so familiar that they could not dread it,—­where, in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts.  But in Zenobia’s case there was some tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives for a few months past.

This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from the tragedy.  For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity?  Slowly, slowly, with many a dreary pause,—­resting the bier often on some rock or balancing it across a mossy log, to take fresh hold,—­we bore our burden onward through the moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the floor of the old farmhouse.  By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of one another’s experience what was to be done.

With those tire-women we left Zenobia.

XXVIII.  BLITHEDALE PASTURE

Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of a burial-ground.  There was some consultation among us in what spot Zenobia might most fitly be laid.  It was my own wish that she should sleep at the base of Eliot’s pulpit, and that on the rugged front of the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,—­ and not another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens to fill up at their long leisure.  But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture, where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their cottage.  And thus it was done, accordingly.